4
Most of the guests not staying in the house had left by midnight; but after that, when the party had dwindled down to four or five couples, the pianist and fiddler, mellowed by champagne and oysters, were persuaded to give first one “extra,” then another, then another.
The pianist, a very anæmic-looking young woman, with a touching absence of class-jealousy, was loath to disappoint them, and, as far as she was concerned, they might have gone on having extras till broad daylight; but the fiddler “turned stunt.”
“I’m a family man” he protested good-humouredly, but firmly (“You’ll have to wait till to-morrow night for that, old bean!” Rory whispered to Arnold, “your wife wouldn’t like it at two o’clock in the morning”), “But I don’t mind ending up with John Peel, as it’s Christmas time,” whereupon, with a wink to the pianist, he struck up with that most poetical of tunes, and, the men of the party bellowing the words, they all broke into a boisterous gallop.
Rory went up to the Doña: “You must dance this with me, please!”
She yielded with a smile; but her eye caught Arnold’s, and they both remembered that it had been Pepa who used always to play John Peel at the end of their dances.
The tune ended with what means to be a flourish, but really is a wail, and they stood still, laughing and breathless—a little haggard, a little dishevelled.
“Where’s Guy?” said some one.
“He went up to bed; he had a headache,” said Arnold, glaring fiercely at Teresa.
Out in the view, from behind the two-ply curtains of silk and of night, a cock crew, and then another; and what they said was just John Peel over again—that ghosts wander in dewy English glades, and that the Past is dead, dead, dead.